Computational Complexity and other fun stuff in math and computer science from Lance Fortnow and Bill Gasarch

Friday, April 25, 2008

If we had 12 fingers on our hands then Obama would be the nominee

dits have said the following (paraphrased):

Hillary needs to win the PA primary by double-digit to get
back in this race.
(She ended up with something like a 9.2 or 9.4 advantage depending
on who you ask. She rounds up to 10, he rounds down to 9.)

What if we had 12 fingers on our hands?
Then we would use a base 12 system and she would
not be close to the magical ``double-digit lead.''
Would she drop out? No, but the win could not
be spinned as dramatically.

Pundits and others do not realize that base 10 is
arbitrary and is not connected to anything
interesting mathematically or politically.

Hippies used to say Don't trust anyone over 30
without realizing that they had given in to the
establishments insistence that base 10 rules us.

Its been said
50 is the new 40.
Why 50 and 40? Should be
49 is the new 36 since squares are ind of base.
(Is 100 is the new 81?)

The Beatles had it right with their song When I'm 64.

A while back this blog noted its 1000th entry.
Mistake- we should have noted its 1024th entry.

9 comments:

Mathematically it may be insignificant, but I'm not sure you can say politically. I would be surprised if there weren't some tie between the perceived significance of the results and the number of digits. If not, why do so many items cost 9.95 and 99.95?

Except if we worked in base 12, then we wouldn't reckon percentages out of 100, but rather out of 144. So Clinton would need to lead by more than 1/12 in order to feel that she should stay in the race.

However, if we had eight fingers, then a "double-digit" lead would be a lead of more than what we call 12.5%.

A double digit lead could also be like a self-fulfilling prophecy where you know that there are people out there who will somehow behave differently because of this, which is why you may postulate there's a bigger difference between 9.4 and 10.2 than numerically implied. The problem then reduces to why those people think that way, ab infinitum.

This sort of deviates from the Clinton vs Obama debate, but this discussion reminds me that pre-Christian Germanic cultures used to use a base 12 system. That is the reason why we have the numbers eleven and twelve rather than oneteen and twoteen. However, their number system had one hundred being 12x10. Historical records around 1000 AD are ambiguous when they say something like "the king sailed with a hundred ships", because both number systems were in use at that time so it is unclear if 100 is meant or 120.